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Friday, 29 July 2011

Etsy tips - an introduction

Although I've had a presence on Etsy since January 2008 and have had a few items listed every now and then, it wasn't until the beginning of the year that I started to really concentrate on it. Until then I'd had my work in exhibitions here and craft shows there but my health made it all a bit tricky, so the obvious solution was to sell online.

I also had a webshop but didn't sell much through it, so I decided to give Etsy a shot. Partly because the listing process was much more straightforward (Zencart was a headache!) but mostly because I knew that people already go to Etsy to window shop... many more than would stumble upon my own webshop!

So I scoured the web for information, found lots of advice, followed some, ignored others. It looks like I chose wisely because it started to work.

The upshot is, in the last 6 months, I've sold more via Etsy than at shows, exhibitions and old webshop *combined* for the past 2 years!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not making enough to pay the bills but I'm confident that as my name becomes more well-known and word spread, I'll get there. For now I'm covering my costs and making enough to invest in more tools, equipment, supplies and sundries for the business.

So anyway, here's the point. A couple of friends started asking me for "magic tips". Then a couple more asked. Then lots more asked... so to stop a lot of searching old emails, copying and pasting I decided to do something useful and Put It In My Blog.

There's lots to learn so I'm going to post every now and again in bitesized chunks. I'll post them as and when I've edited my various email-novels into a digestable and readable format :).

NB: These tips come with no guarantee - these are just what I did to get my Etsy pageviews from a monthly total of 82 (December 2010) up to 9332 (June 2011).

Thanks for your support :) I wasn't sure if I'd have an audience for this as I only gleaned this info from around the web. However, it's handy to have everything in one place I guess and I'm happy to help if I can :)